Orestes Brownson1803-1876

The young Brownson

Biography

Orestes Augustus Brownson, philosopher, minister, essayist, and reviewer, was born in
Stockbridge, Vermont in 1803. Two years later his father Sylvester Augustus
Brownson died, leaving his family in a financially difficult situation. Relief
Metcalf, Orestes' mother, sent him to Royalton, Vermont. There he lived in
a Puritan/Calvinistic atmosphere with a couple of elderly farmers until he was
fourteen.

Brownson became an avid reader despite the fact
that during his Royalton years he only read a few books, all of them
religious. He attended different churches there and developed his critical
skills by comparing their sermons. At fourteen he returned to his family; his
mother moved to New York State.

He received a modest education then and worked
in a printer's office. The range of his readings broadened significantly; he
read Aristotle, St.Augustine, Abbate Gioberti, Pierre Leroux, Plato Suarez,
St.Thomas, and many others. Brownson began to teach when he was twenty, first
in Stillwater, N.Y., then in Detroit. Three years later he became a
Universalist preacher, then the editor of the Universalistic theological
journal Gospel Advocate.

But the teaching and preaching did not
occupy his entire time. In his twenties O.Brownson was an active democrat. He
supported the Workingman's Party that advocated the Owen-Wright theory of
education, which envisioned two year olds starting their state-controlled and
state-provided education. Brownson, then editor of "Genesee Republican" and "
Herald of Reform," supported the Owen-Wright theory, but he also expressed his
concern about the possible outcome of such education. He predicted a fall of
parental authority and children being shaped into the " well-trained animals"
("The Convert," Works, V, 65-66).

At the age of thirty Brownson became a Unitarian
pastor; Dr. W. E. Channing's sermons lured him into Unitarianism. He published The
Boston Quarterly and wrote his articles there along with such
Transcendentalists as Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, and George Ripley. His
own articles were of a literary, philosophical and political nature. His
articles also appeared in the Transcendentalist magazine, the Dial. With other Transcendentalists he
participated to some degree in the Brook Farm experiment. Unlike the Transcendentalists he
thought that men were sinful.

Brownson's readings and his experiences within
the religious and political domain (e.g. he participated in Van Buren election
in 1840) directed his thoughts from, as he called them," democratic illusions"
to religious and political conservatism:

I read for the first time
Aristotle on Politics; I read the best treatises, ancient and modern, on
Government within my reach; I studied the contributors of Greece and Rome,
and their history, the political administration of ancient Persia, the
feudal system, and the constitutions of modern states, in the light of such
experience and such philosophy as I had, and come to the conclusion that the
condition of liberty is order, and that in this world we must seek, not
equality but justice between man and man, a firm, strong, and efficient
government is necessary. Liberty is not in the absence of authority, but in
being held to obey only just and legitimate authority. Evidently, I had
changed systems, and had entered another order of ideas. Government was no
longer the mere agent of society, as my democratic masters had taught me,
but an authority having the right and the power to govern society, and
direct an aid as a wise providence, in fulfilling its destiny. I became
henceforth a conservative in politics, instead of an impracticable radical
and through political conservatism I advanced rapidly towards religious
conservatism. So I date my beginning to amend, from the publication of my
so-called " horrible doctrines" ("The Convert," Works , V,
21-22).

Then in 1844 (the year
of Emerson's second "Nature" essay) Brownson and his family converted to Catholicism. The
very negative response of the Transcendentalists to his conversion is best
expressed in Theodore Parker's sermon that ascribed to Brownson an "unbalanced mind,
intellectual always, but spiritual never" (J.Weiss, II, 28). After that,
the Transcendentalists ignored him.

Brownson wrote The Convert; or Leaves from my
Experience, in which he traces "with fidelity his entire religious life
down to his admission to the bosom of the Catholic Church." (The Catholic
Encyclopedia. ). His religious conversion was accompanied by his
disappointment with political liberalism. In "The Democratic Principle" he
wrote:

What I saw served to dispel my
democratic illusions, to break the idol I had worshipped, and shook to its
foundation my belief in the divinity of the people, or in their will as the
expression of eternal justice. I saw that they could easily be duped, easily
made victims of the designing, and carried away by own irresistible passion
in the wrong as easily as in the right . . . .I ceased henceforth to believe in
democracy. (Works,
XVIII, 224)

During the Civil War
O.Brownson lost two sons. Three years later he died in Detroit,
Michigan; he was later interred at the Brownson Memorial Chapel in the Sacred Heart Church at the University of Notre Dame.

As a Catholic he wrote articles for Ave
Maria (which he established), The Catholic World, and the American Catholic Quarterly Review.
He valued German Catholic thought and regretted the
fact that it was unknown to the American Catholics. Brownson's fully
crystallized political thought is best expressed in "The American Republic,"
somewhere between moderate conservatism and constructive
liberalism. Within the
literary field he advocated a development of the American literature which he
envisioned as a truth-seeking and independent from the European influences
(the Transcendentalists' approach); he denied the art for art's sake approach to
literature, and incorporated intellect, morality, charity, compassion, along
with freedom and nobility of spirit in literature. His writings are extensive,
interesting and little known, which is to be regretted because he represents,
so typically American, independent thinking and search for the truth.